On Architecture: Living in a dream world

They're billed as eco-friendly, but Street of Dreams homes are really about lavish luxury

By LAWRENCE CHEEK, SPECIAL TO THE P-I

Updated
10:00 pm PDT, Monday, July 30, 2007

The patio area of the Urban Lodge, one of five homes on this year's Street of Dreams in Woodinville. The smallest house measures a whopping 4,200 square feet.

The patio area of the Urban Lodge, one of five homes on this year's Street of Dreams in Woodinville. The smallest house measures a whopping 4,200 square feet.

Photo: Grant M. Haller/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Photo: Grant M. Haller/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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The patio area of the Urban Lodge, one of five homes on this year's Street of Dreams in Woodinville. The smallest house measures a whopping 4,200 square feet.

The patio area of the Urban Lodge, one of five homes on this year's Street of Dreams in Woodinville. The smallest house measures a whopping 4,200 square feet.

Photo: Grant M. Haller/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

On Architecture: Living in a dream world

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This year, Seattle's annual Street of Dreams home show is trying to paint itself green, bringing waterfalls indoors to recall a home's "connection to nature," and outfitting the mansions with features such as on-demand water heating and recycled paper countertops that resemble stone.

But as a theme, this rings as hollow as a General Motors promise to build energy-efficient SUVs. The smallest house in this year's collection outside Woodinville is 4,200 square feet, and the showcase dwellings are as lavish as ever in anachronistic pomp and fatuous luxury.

When this column last slipped into the Street of Dreams two years back, it whacked away at the houses' rampant irrelevance and suggested the builders turn their efforts to a Street of Reality, which would address the serious issue of increasingly unaffordable housing for the middle class. But forget it; that was a fantasy dream in itself. However it's approached, affordable housing would mean thinner profits for builders and suppliers, so there's no incentive for showcasing concepts that might lead that way.

What might be useful this time is to probe into a couple of under-the surface questions: Why do these "dream" houses look the way they do? And what's wrong with how they shape people's real-world aspirations?

As usual, none of the five '07 houses embraces modernism, at least not on the outside. Although each has a stylistic theme -- Craftsman, Prairie Style, French Provincial -- all could be lumped into the catchall "traditional" with no inaccuracy. Pitched roofs, square corners, porches framed by columns -- all these read as the elements of a fundamentally conservative house-design vocabulary.

Why, in a city (or at least on its distant outskirts) that embraces high-tech and generally progressive ideas? You'd expect home design to express conservatism in the suburbs of Indianapolis, but why isn't Seattle more adventurous?

The answer is probably that our entire culture of home buying and ownership is structured to be timid and conservative, from sea to shining sea. Would-be homeowners looking for the unusual may find kindred spirits among architects -- architecture schools teach and preach modernism, not French Provincial -- but not among real estate agents, bankers, builders, insurers, neighborhood associations and friends proffering conventional wisdom.

Underlying this culture is the American concept of viewing the home as a short-term investment, a place to stash the bulk of the family's net worth for a few short years, then move on. It's as close to a fail-safe investment as there is, unless it's in a neighborhood in decline or has characteristics that could make it tough to sell. And everyone will tell you that modernism or eccentricity makes for that tough sell, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Another force at play here is the idea of viewing one's home as a refuge from the pressures of life in the outside world. Several years ago I wrote a story for another newspaper on the surprising number of young Northwest techies living in log homes, of all things. One 32-year-old Microsoft manager explained: "Some people would see it as a contradiction, but I'm sort of a simplistic guy. The log home represents simplicity. It helps me forget about work. When we're not in death-march stage on shipping a product, I can come home and completely check out."

We're all enmeshed in pressures that can easily seem overwhelming: jobs or technology that are changing too fast to keep up, a world increasingly unbalanced by terrorism, social movements that don't follow the old rules. When home and neighborhood look like something that could have been built a century ago (but inside secretly harbor all the modern conveniences, such as five bathrooms), they become islands of security and stability -- at least symbolically.

Is that so bad? Maybe it is. If architecture shelters us in a world of fantasy, then it becomes easier to duck out on addressing real-world problems. Which is what the Street of Dreams itself does, year after year.

The show's more pernicious effect may be to set up these grandly scaled houses as ideals, the homes and lifestyles to which we all should aspire. It feeds the relentless American thirst for bigness, and this at a time when any rational reading of environmental signposts argues for a fundamental change in our culture.

The real issue for domestic architecture in our time is how to fulfill Mies van der Rohe's modernist promise: "Less is more." Twentieth-century modernism largely failed to deliver because it merely stripped architecture of ornament and character and imagination, and with them evaporated warmth and humanity. In this century, "less is more" needs to be a prescription for building houses, neighborhoods and cities with a lighter footprint on the Earth -- and living better because of it.

Some of the grand spaces on parade in the Street of Dreams turn Mies' aphorism on its head: More, as it turns out, is less.

The great room in the Urban Lodge is a baronial hall some 25 feet wide and 45 feet long. On first acquaintance it's a breathtaking space, lavishly flooded with light from opposing rows of clerestory windows and embraced by heavy, timber open trusses. But in fact, most of us instinctively feel uncomfortable in a domestic room of this scale except when it's filled by a party. Suburbs across America are full of McMansions with vast living rooms that rarely find any practical use.

Wander through enough of these Dreams, and you realize they're really more a collection of self-contained theme parks than homes. This is actually not far from the show's intent, which is to showcase designer ideas, trends and products that might trickle down into submillionaires' home-improvement budgets.

But how satisfying can it be to live in a theme park, unless the theme is one you dreamed up yourself? That's the baseline trouble with the Street of Dreams -- it urges us to invest in bits and pieces of someone else's fantasy, rather than starting with a clean slate and a dream of one's own.